About The Show

The Photographers' Gallery has launched its new digital programme with Born in 1987: The Animated GIF, an exhibition devoted to this overlooked image format native to the web and the computer screen. The exhibition features over 40 GIF images by practitioners from a range of creative disciplines. For many, this was their first opportunity to experiment with the medium. The resulting GIFs range from the graphic to the photographic, the subtle to the psychedelic, and demonstrate a wide diversity of approaches which respond to the GIF's particular history and aesthetic qualities. The GIFs on this website are also viewable on The Wall, a 2.7 x 3m Sharp Video Wall located on the ground floor of our gallery in Ramillies Street, London. From 17th June, these works will be joined by a rotating selection of submissions from the public. Instructions on how to contribute can be found here. More information and images of The Wall can be found here.

The Gif Makers

James Bridle is a writer, publisher and technologist. He makes things with books and the internet, and writes about what he does at http://booktwo.org. The image depicts the progressive degradation of an image caused by applying every single Instagram filter in turn. I happen to believe that the filter process in apps like Instagram and now increasingly pervasive across digital photography is a semi-conscious process of legitimisation in time, engraining disposable images of the moment with a patina of memory and experience, in order to save and justify them. The source image is a photograph of an architectural visualisation, part of my Render Ghosts series  i.e., it is already an unreal and imaginary projection of a possible future, which is worn away by our attempt to memorialise it, before it has even fully formed.

James Bridle is a writer, publisher and technologist. He makes things with books and the internet, and writes about what he does at http://booktwo.org.

The image depicts the progressive degradation of an image caused by applying every single Instagram filter in turn. I happen to believe that the filter process in apps like Instagram and now increasingly pervasive across digital photography is a semi-conscious process of legitimisation in time, engraining disposable images of the moment with a patina of memory and experience, in order to save and justify them.

The source image is a photograph of an architectural visualisation, part of my Render Ghosts series  i.e., it is already an unreal and imaginary projection of a possible future, which is worn away by our attempt to memorialise it, before it has even fully formed.

Tags gif bornin1987 jamesbridle thephotographersgallery